Threats
Organisational Threats
Organisational threats to digital materials are risks that come from within an organisation. These can be political, human, or legal in nature. For example, if a company goes through major changes or shuts down, its digital assets may be lost or become inaccessible. Other risks include a lack of awareness, interest, funding, or the necessary skills to properly preserve digital materials. Complex systems or unclear responsibilities can also overwhelm staff or lead to important files being overlooked. Additionally, if there are no consistent policies or procedures, some materials might be wrongly excluded from preservation. Even when an organisation has the resources and willingness to preserve digital content, legal restrictions can sometimes prevent it.
Complexity Limitations
Many factors conspiring to overwhelm resources.
Lack of Standardisation
The absence of consistent, widely adopted practices, formats, protocols or frameworks for preserving digital content over time e.g. file formats, metadata schemas, workflows, storage, infrastructure or policy. This can create significant challenges for organizations trying to ensure long-term access to digital materials.
Legal Constraints
Laws, regulations and contractual obligations that affect how digital materials can be preserved, accessed, shared or stored over time. These constraints can vary widely depending on jurisdiction, sector, and the nature of the digital content but may include copyright or data protection laws, access and use restrictions, jurisdictional conflicts and retention schedules.
Organisational Change
Business changes or organisations that no longer exist.
Organisational Limits
Lack of awareness, business interest, financial resources, and/or skills.
Out of Band
Material ignored because it does not come from a ‘recognised source for digital preservation.’
Sensitive Data
Digital information that requires special handling due to its potential to cause harm, violate privacy or breach legal or ethical obligations if improperly accessed, disclosed or preserved e.g. personally identifiable information, confidential business information, classified or government-sensitive data, culturally or ethically sensitive data, legal data, health or medical records.
Complexity Threats
Complexity threats arise when it's unclear who owns the data or who has the right to access it. This can happen with data stored on specific platforms, data that is proprietary, or data meant only for short-term use—like messages on chat apps that aren’t designed to be saved. Another issue is data that lacks proper metadata or has inconsistent information, making it difficult to find, interpret, or preserve.
Complex Platforms
Digital systems or environments that are technically intricate, multifaceted or difficult to manage and maintain over time e.g. proprietary or custom-built systems, interactive or dynamic content, software dependent environments, cloud-based platforms, multimedia systems, distributed, federated or legacy systems.
Ephemeral Services
Services designed not to retain information.
Lack of Metadata
e.g. Provenance/chain of custody, Versioning, Code-book (e.g. Database structure, spreadsheet column contents), IPR
Proprietary Data
Digital content or information that is owned by an individual, organization, or vendor and is subject to restrictions on access, use, modification, or distribution. This type of data is often tied to specific software, formats, or platforms that are not openly documented or freely available.
Content Threats
Digital content encompasses the files, metadata and storage media essential for preservation. Content threats arise when integrity is compromised, metadata is inaccurate or incomprehensible, and the appropriate storage media is no longer available to ensure retrievability – thus many Content threats are likely to overlap with Organisational and Technical threats. Any one of these Content threats may lead to loss of accessibility, authenticity and integrity.
Data Types/File-Formats
Software obsolescence, lack of standards but also technical protection measures e.g. Digital Rights Management (DRM).
Technological Threats
Obsolescence and a lack of standards are central to technological threats to digital preservation. As older hardware, software and file formats become outdated or unsupported, this makes it difficult or even impossible to access or read digital materials created with them. For example, files stored on floppy disks or created with now-defunct software may no longer be accessible without specialized tools or emulators. At the same time, the lack of widely adopted standards for file formats, metadata, and preservation practices may lead to inconsistencies in how digital materials are stored and managed. Without standardization, it becomes harder to ensure long-term accessibility, interoperability, and authenticity of digital content across different systems and over time.
Hardware/Media
Physical components and storage devices used to store digital content.
Proprietary and Custom-built Hardware
Physical devices or systems that are either owned and controlled by a specific vendor or manufacturer using non-standard components or interfaces (proprietary) or uniquely designed for a specific organization or purpose often without broad documentation or support (custom-built).
Software
The programs, applications, and operating systems that are used to create, manage, access, and preserve digital content e.g. commercial or embedded software.